Regardless of your goals, the first phase of almost any training program involves a great deal of stabilization training. For some, this is frustrating! You want to ask your trainer, “Why the heck am I standing in one foot, pulling an exercise band?” You want to jump right into squats, bench press, and dead lifts. For others, usually those of you with weight loss goals, your want to know why you should be doing any strength training at all!
Stability training is the most important phase of your exercise program. Without it, you’ll literally be out of balance and your risk of future injuries go through the roof! So why is that?
First of all, let’s talk about your long-term goals. Whether you want to build strength, lose weight, or just feel better on a daily basis, you’ll eventually need to be doing some higher intensity workouts. These workouts will include full-body exercises and circuits. For your body to perform these workouts safely and get the maximum benefits, you need to have a strong core and eliminate your muscle imbalances. This is exactly what stability training does!
You see, almost everybody who’s new to exercising has muscle imbalances. Their bodies are used to being in the same position and doing the same movements over and over again. Just think of anybody who spends over an hour a day driving or hunched over a computer. But muscle imbalances aren’t just for people who are inactive. Think of a professional baseball pitcher who does the same throwing motion, again and again, for hours! Yes, the professional athlete can have just as many muscle imbalances as the computer programmer!
When your muscles are out of balance it will only get worse unless you do something about it! Certain muscles get stronger and less flexible. They call these muscles “overactive.” Other muscles get weaker and more flexible. These muscles are called “underactive.” Your body becomes over reliant on your overactive muscle, making them even stronger and less flexible. Meanwhile you’re underactive muscles are underutilized, making them even weaker and more flexible. As these muscle imbalances get worse, your risk of injury increases, especially if you’re doing high-intensity workouts!
So what can you do about it?
Listen to your trainer, but most likely they will tell you to stretch certain muscle groups and strengthen others. I usually recommend clients to do exercises that require them to develop their balance and core strength. One of my personal favorites is the single-leg squat. Here’s how I train clients to do it:
First, I make sure my client can perform a body weight squat on two legs first. The single leg squat is identical to the body weight squat except for the fact that it is on 1 leg instead of 2. When performing a body-weight squat you want to have your toes pointed forward while you act like you’re sitting down in an invisible chair. You don’t want to lean too far forward and you want to try to sit down as low as you can safely. As you stand up, you want to concentrate on using your glutes as much as possible. If the body-weight squat is difficult, you can start of squatting with a stability ball between your back and the wall.
As you get better with the squat, you can progress to a lunge, and then the single-leg squat. Give it a shot!
If you need an extra challenge, try the single leg squat on a stability disk.
